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I have a weird RDP situation. I have an office that is connected over public internet to another office and they are connecting 8-10 low-use (no realtime video, etc) RDP connections. The connection on both is a Telus 25/5 connection. The devices connecting from 'satellite office' are mostly all Wyse Terminals.

Periodically, the whole office RDP connections 'freeze', then drop where a reconnection comes into play. Lately the office has only lost half of the terminals in one go.

Normally I would say it's bandwidth, but this is all they do for traffic so even the 5MBPs upload should be able to accommodate 8-10 RDP connections. They are both using Cisco SMB RV042G dual WAN routers (Ive checked the logs and it's not flipping to WAN2 during these outage times).

I have found that some people say it's GPOs pushing an update, but these are WYSE terminals so it eliminates the end user stations.

Am I expecting it too much for it to be consistently running ok over public internet? I am not even leaving the town, which is probably only 1 POP point between end routers to be honest!

That was my next course of action. Again though, the only thing they run is RDP and 1-2 streams of lo-fi internet radio, so I don't see bandwidth management fixing it, but will try it as a next step. Do you think it's just bandwidth issues? or anything possible from the remote Windows 2008 (non-r2) server that is running on the other side.

The previous IT company set it up as a DC and RDP server. It has USB based backups on it, and I was told if there are any disk issues whatsoever, the USB bus can tie up the main bus and possibly cause this lag. I see there is a seldom USB based dis error but it doesn't correspond to the drops. Am I barking up the wrong tree?

Are all of the users experiencing disconnects on the same switch locally? I have had similar issues where a few users that were on a 10/100 switch while the rest were on a gigabit, all of the slower connections were experiencing issues, and there was no real log of any disconnects or dropped connections issues on the routers at either location.

The site that is getting the drops is on a single HP Procurve gigabit. Unfortunately the other site is all local so even if the internet/switching was sketchy, I wouldn't see it. The main site (non-disconnect) is on a small 8 port switch, and then extras going direct into firewall. Steve, I do ping tests and yes I get the odd drop, but unfortunately that doesn't nail down for me where the problem is. I will do a ping plotter from the server but where I find the challenge is that I don't know WHY it is being dropped. Pipe is saturated? server is timing a packet out due to overwork (it's a 12 core server with raid 10 on 15k drives with sufficient ram).

What are good tools to use to check if the link is saturated or if the packets are being dropped by processes on the server? I am just not sure where to start looking...

Have you checked the speed/duplex settings on the handoff from the ISP to your firewall and router? Sometimes the negotiation will not be correct and can cause issues.

You may need to contact your ISP to get the speed/duplex settings on their device. If it is set to auto negotiate, have them set it to 1000/full (or the fastest your devices can handle) and set your devices to match.

Any solution to this problem ? I seem to have a similar problem on my LAN network. Some times the RDP just won't connect but 1 min later it works. Then during the RDP session from time to time it will disconnect me (not because I'm idle) Very annoying ! It seems this issue is also screwing up lots of my backup attempts for this server.

We found that it was an isp issue with a local alarm vendor. The company was on dsl through the phone line and the alarm would check in periodically and cut them off briefly. The vendor shouldnt have wired it that way. A lot of troubleshooting for something very simple, but i would never have thought to start there...

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